Elamite Administration

Administration is a constitutive element of a state and this is confirmed for the kingdoms reigning over Susiana and Anshan by the Elamite administrative tablets from Tall-e Malyan (c. 1000 BCE) and Susa (c. 600 BCE), while the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury tablets attest to the existence of an Achaemenid administration writing in Elamite. Earlier administrative corpora from Susa were written in Akkadian and dated to the Old Akkadian (under the Akkadian foreign dominion) and Old Babylonian period (under the Sukkalmah dynasty); Akkadian is still in use in the administrative tablets from Haft Tappeh (c. 15th century BCE). Each of these corpora provides only a partial view of the related administrative institution, being concerned with the management of some specific categories of products (metal objects, clothing and weaponry, food rations, etc.). Moreover, textuality represents in turn only a part of the administrative system, where other means of verbal and non-textual communication (seals above all) were used. Besides economy, the study of an administrative corpus feeds data to other research fields like onomastics and prosopography, toponymy and historical geography, chronology and history of science (for timekeeping).